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Yeah, I don't see any issue with Starlink getting subscribers. HughesNet has 1.3 million subscribers in the US and Canada alone. ViaSat has 600,000. There ar
by jlmorton 5y ago
Yeah, I don't see any issue with Starlink getting subscribers. HughesNet has 1.3 million subscribers in the US and Canada alone. ViaSat has 600,000. There are 10x that on slow rural DSL. And that's just North America.
Demand is not going to be the problem for Starlink. If they can roll-out a service just a bit more reliable than their current beta, and they can increase their network capacity fast enough, they will have tens of millions of subscribers in a few years.
- xkjkls 5y agoHughesNet only has a billion in revenue though. With a $30 billion + investment in the network, Starlink needs to have far far more subscribes than that to be able to recoup the costs.
- wmf 5y agoFortunately Starlink is global so the addressable market is more like 100M customers.
- xkjkls 5y ago100 million customers with money? Once you start saying that the customer base is rural Africa or something like that, you need to massively lower your ASP expectations.
- wmf 5y agoThe global middle class is over 1B people; if 10% of them are rural that's over 100M.
- xkjkls 5y agoThat group is defined as people who make $10-20 a day. Starlink isn't selling at $100 to people who only make $4,000 a year
- hackeraccount 5y agoArguably both the amount they make and the number of people is increasing. Plus Internet access may be a push for people to stay or move to a more rural location.